Your Files, Now with Less Pulp! File Juicer Reviewed
About a month ago the fine folks at Echo One updated File Juicer to version 4.9.8. File Juicer is a deceptively simple application that purports to extract, or juice, everything from anything. Simply drop any file onto the running application (or it’s Dock icon) and away it goes. For the most part, File Juicer is file agnostic. It really doesn’t care what you drag onto it. File Juicer examines the file and looks for common formats for images, audio, video, documents, or even plain text files inside.
File Juicer then saves the contents of the file to your desktop or to any other location on your Mac.
Additionally, you can specify what types of files you want File Juicer to look for within the application’s Preferences configuration. For a detailed list of file types handled by File Juicer check out its Formats List.
It must be said that File Juicer is not another unarchiving app for the Mac. It won’t extract the contents of a zip, rar, tgz, or any other compressed file for that matter — you can do that from Finder or the previously mentioned Unarchiver. It will, however juice compressed files from within other files, for example a zipped file inside of a Microsoft Word document will be extracted as a zip file.
File Juicer is one of the most useful apps I’ve ever installed on my Mac. It follows in the fine tradition of Mac apps which do one thing, and do it very well. File Juicer might not become a part of your daily workflow, but when you need it you’ll be glad it’s there.
Here are just a few of the things I’ve been able to do with File Juicer:
Juiced images from a PowerPoint ppt file.
Juiced images and text from pdf files.
Converted self-extracting zip files (.exe) back to standard zip files.
If I had one critique for File Juicer it would be that I wish the developers had incorporated a little bit of eye candy into the app. While it may pale in a visual comparison to many a member of the so-called “Delicious Generation”, it’s much more functional and useful than the majority those apps.
One of the coolest features built right into File Juicer is it’s ability to juice the images, html files and Flash (swf) files from your Browser Cache. When I tested this option on Firefox I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly it ran and how interesting the resulting mix of files were.
Download a 7-day trial of File Juicer and give it a go. If you decide to play for keeps, once your trial is up, a license for File Juicer will run you €11.95 (about $18.00).
Thanks for pointing me at Juicer.
I just tried it on a microsoft html archive (.mht) file (which neither firefox nor safari can read).
Unfortunately juicer made a read mash of it and the resulting file was unreadable collection of images and pages. all the links and frames were non-functional
All I could do was to fire up parallels and use Internet Explorer to read the same file
I’ve never seen it have problems with any of the files I’ve thrown at it. There’s an included Automator Action for the conversion of MHT files that might be handy.
Browsing File Juicer help section I found some infomration specific to MHT files. Check it out for more details.
Hope that helps.
Wonderful little tool here, Ammon! Thanks for the review. I’m definitely going to give this one a whirl.